The Black Lab Software team, through Roberto J. Dohnert, had the pleasure of announcing earlier today, March 24, the immediate availability for download of all four editions of Black Lab Linux 6.5, which includes Xfce 4.12, KDE 4.14.2, MATE 1.8.1, and GNOME 3.10.2 desktop environments.

The White House has plucked 28-year-old David Recordon, engineering director at Facebook, as its first IT Director. A strong open source advocate with a decidedly non-button-down appearance, Recordon will be charged with modernizing the White House’s technology. Here’s a closer look at one of our newest public servants…

arstechnica.com broke the news Friday that Windows 10 will "make the Secure Boot alt-OS lock out a reality" for Linux and other alternative operating systems. If not actual "lock out," then Windows 10 could making installing an alt-OS a big fat headache for developers and users trying to install them. Elsewhere, Richard Stallman talked Net Neutrality and systemd.

Gumstix has updated its wireless enabled, Linux-oriented Overo Storm modules with new “Storm-Y” models that add WiFi access point and BLE 4.1 functions.

Last summer, when Gumstix announced a Storm-P version of its wireless-enabled Overo Storm computer-on-modules, the company said the Storm was its most popular model. Whereas the Storm-P added WiFi Direct support via Wi2Wi’s W2CBW0015 wireless module, the new Storm-Y, which appears to supersede it, goes with a Texas Instruments WiLink 8 module.

Today, the open source model is much better understood, and organisations are considering it as vital to the future of digital business and government services. A recent survey found that more than 50% of respondents are moving into the open source space.

Last week I merged in a few important changes for the upcoming KWin 5.3 release. The rootless Xwayland support is integrated, which means we are a huge step closer to managing Wayland clients. Rendering, input and cursor is already using the Wayland code paths and will be shared with proper Wayland clients. I have already started working on code for that and have it working quite nicely already but decided to delay the integration for Plasma 5.4.

Several days ago, I talked about how Plasma 5 is awesome, and how it’s the cure to all worries in this world, particularly those related to aesthetics, functionality and desktops. All fanboyism aside, Plasma shapes up to become a modern and relevant Linux desktop environment, with an intelligent sense of order and efficiency.

So I’ve shown you a whole bunch of cool things, how about some more? In this guide, I will reveal a few hacks that can make you happier and more productive with Plasma. Sure, you can explore on your own, and experienced users probably won’t find this piece remarkable, but for new users and fresh Windows converts, this article is like someone holding your hand during your first trip to Tijuana.

The Mutter 3.16.0 and GNOME Shell 3.16.0 releases don't explicitly bring any big changes over the earlier 3.15.x releases, but for these updated key GNOME 3 components there are some big changes compared to GNOME 3.14.

Fedora 22 Alpha has been released by Fedora Project, it now available to download and install for test drive. The Alpha version of Fedora 22 GNOME edition comes with many enhancements from the GNOME 3.16 Beta desktop environment, such as the revamped GNOME Shell theme, GNOME 3.16’s brand-new notification system that is integrated beside calendar applet, Nautilus improvements, and many other goodies.

The BPF In-Kernel Virtual Machine will likely see new functionality with the next Linux kernel release cycle, Linux 4.1.

A new patch series led by Alexei Starovoitov appears about ready as new tracing code that allows for eBPF programs to be attached to KProbes. Alexei mentioned in his latest tracing patch series that this eBPF code for kprobes appears ready, "I think it's good to go."

There has been a lot of good news in the web-stats of GNU/Linux this year. It’s become clear to me, despite what others write, that the Year Of The GNU/Linux Desktop can happen and it is happening this year.

At the request of numerous “angry” Ubuntu MATE fans, Martin Wimpress announced a few minutes ago, March 23, the immediate availability for download of the second maintenance release of the Ubuntu MATE 14.04 LTS (Long Term Support) operating system.

Wrishiraj Kaushik had the pleasure of announcing today, March 23, the immediate availability for download of the final release of his awesome SuperX 3.0 Linux operating system for computers. This major version includes a great number of features, updated applications, new artwork, and lots of under the hood improvements.

The Wind River Technology Profile updates announced today in conjunction with the Embedded Linux Conference in San Jose, Calif. bring three of Wind River’s vertical implementations of Wind River Linux up to date with last October’s Wind River Linux 7. The Open Virtualization, Security, and Carrier Grade Profiles, which are based on Wind River Linux, similarly advance to a foundation based on the latest Linux kernel, toolchain, and user space of the open source Yocto Linux 1.7.

The GNOME development team, through Matthias Clasen, has the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of GTK+ 3.16.0, a powerful, open-source and cross-platform toolkit used in the GNOME 3.16 desktop environment for creating graphical user interfaces.

I wanted to do this review a few weeks ago but didn't get the chance until now. Anyway, although I have reviewed Korora a few times before on this blog, I have not reviewed its Cinnamon edition until now. I particularly wanted to try the Cinnamon edition mainly because I seem to have bad luck whenever I try other distributions with Cinnamon, so I wanted to see if that would change here. As usual, I tried it as a live USB system made with UnetBootin. Follow the jump to see what it's like.

The Xfce desktop environment sees its first point release today, March 23. While there’s no official announcement on the project’s website at the moment of writing this article, we can tell you that this is a bugfix release addressing some of the issues from Xfce 4.12.

GNU Nano 2.4.0 was released this morning as the first stable update to this open-source CLI text editor in a number of years.

This first stable update to GNU Nano in years is codenamed "Lizf" and brings a wide variety of changes. Among the new features of this alternative to Vim and Emacs is a fully-functionality undo system, Vim-compatible file locking, linter support, formatter support, flexible syntax highlighting, and many bug-fixes.

We’ve announced last week that the development cycle of the highly anticipated GNOME 3.16 desktop environment ended with the Release Candidate (RC) version, which was made available for testing to users worldwide on March 18, 2015.